Customer Reviews

Pinstripes & Pearls: The Women of the Harvard Law Class of '64 Who Forged an Old Girl Network and Paved the Way for Future Generations

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I loved this book!! What an inspiration! I was so interested in knowing what motivated these women to go to Harvard back in the 60's. I found it also interesting that all of the women in the book had the support of their fathers. How wonderful! Their determination to succeed should give hope to every woman today. The descriptions of the women's experiences at the Harvard Law school is at times moving and humorous. Their lives from an early age to their lives' today was exciting to read. And to get a glimpse of Harvard through the eyes of the author and others at Harvard in those days who have risen to such fame and prominence in our society today was fascinating. I think Judith Hope did a great job writing this book, and I particularly enjoyed reading about her life -- wow!! What an exciting life!

Pinstripes and Pearls made for a very late evening -- I couldn't bring myself to put it down to go to sleep.

I found myself cheering for the author and all of her classmates as they struggled through life, law school, relationships, and their legal careers -- and laughing out loud at some of the humorous twists in their lives.

Mostly, though, the book made me feel like I could conquer the world someday. I realized that whatever difficulties I and my peers are now facing as new women attorneys have been confronted -- and triumphantly surmounted -- by the very successful author and her impressive classmates. I marveled at the fact that prior to reading the book, I assumed that each of the story's protagonists had achieved their goals so effortlessly. It was refreshing to know that it was difficult for these prominent women too, but that they all got through it all in the end with grit, fierce determination, and love.

The book was inspiring and immensely satisfying to me as a woman attorney. I intend to pass it along as a birthday gift to all of my attorney friends and law school classmates. I highly recommend reading it.

Before commenting on this book, let me mention that I am a graduate of Harvard Law School in 1971. By then, women were about 10 percent of the class, and some of the problems described in this book had been overcome. But many had not. Since then, I have had the pleasure of attending many of the special celebrations on the anniversaries of the admission of women to the school on September 1950. But in those gatherings, I have heard few stories as moving as the ones in this book.

This book moved me even more than the fine memoir, One-L, that has become a classic concerning legal education.

Ms. Judith Richards Hope is one of the most successful graduates of Harvard Law School in the last 40 years. Many in her situation would have chosen to write a memoir, basically recounting how she did so well. I admire her for choosing to write the story of all the 20 women in her class (1964) and also including the remarkable Elizabeth Dole who worked in the library during that class's first year before deciding to apply and join the class of 1965.

The book begins with the history of why women had been excluded from Harvard Law School. Mostly it's nonsense about not being sure of the intellectual capacity of women, not wanting to keep a man from practicing law who might stick with it for more years than a women, concern about whether law firms would hire women, and the cost of putting in women's bathrooms. It's not a pretty story, but that's all history now. Women saw, they came, and they persevered and prospered.

If you are like me, you'll enjoy hearing about the family backgrounds that encouraged these women to enter what was a challenging and hostile educational environment. The silliness at the school will alternately amuse and annoy you. There weren't enough bath rooms. Some professors chose to have Ladies Days when they would call on women, and ignore them otherwise. Well-intentioned efforts often backfired and made the women feel uncomfortable . . . such as when Dean Griswold had everyone over for dinner at his home.

The law firm silliness was even worse. It was impressive how the women got around that. Ms. Hope's negotiating strategy with Edward Bennett Williams was remarkable.

Then, trying to be a perfect mom and a great lawyer created even more silliness . . . and lots of fatigue. But they did it. It's great!!!

I know many of the people described in the book, and I thought that they were characterized accurately with one exception. Eleanor Appel of the Placement Office comes in for a lot of criticism for not trying to make law firms change their prejudiced ways. What the book does not make clear is that Ms. Appel was not a lawyer. She was a Radcliffe graduate. With no one in the faculty to back her in forcing recruiters to change, all she could have accomplished was getting herself fired by trying to make recruiters change. I personally overheard many conversations she had where she argued effectively the case that women and minorities should receive better treatment, and observed the white male lawyers then go on to ignore her arguments. If there is a fault, it is with the faculty. They had the bully pulpit to do more, but did not.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand how women get to be tops in the legal profession. I even more highly recommend it as a story of human struggle and success.

These are remarkable people, and they have already made our world a better one for their willingness to run the gauntlet in the legal profession. Thank you, women of the class of 1964!

Where else are people being excluded from opportunities? What can you do to change that?

As someone who was born after Ms. Hope entered law school at Harvard, this personal history of the struggles against the overt and covert discrimination women faced in the '60's is an eye opener. I can't imagine dealing with the unabashed sexism that Ms. Hope and her contemporaries encountered, yet here it is, detailed in anecdote after anecdote.

The book is a series of personal histories that enlighten all of us about the struggles women and men alike went through to get to the precarious balance of sexual politics that we live in today. In the telling, Ms. Hope illuminates the conflicts that women experience to this day while trying to balance work and family. One of the most painful passages of the book reveals Ms. Hope's own children's ambivalence about her accomplishments as a lawyer, mother and woman.

This book is not just an opportunity for 60-something lawyers to reminisce about their salad days. It's important for my contemporaries of both genders to understand the stories of the 1960's were much more than "flower power" hippies protesting Vietnam or sitting around taking drugs and listening to the Beatles. We can do no worse than starting with this book that tells the stories of a small group of women's experiences at Harvard Law School in the early '60's and their struggles to balance careers and family in the turbulent years that followed. Also, if you can read this book and not regret the lost potential of Pat Schroeder's aborted presidential campaign, you're a stronger person than I.

If you are a woman who struggles to balance career aspirations with a dedication to domestic ideals this is a must-read book. In an honest and compassionate manner Hope details the lives of the women in her class. These are women who listened to their intellectual hearts despite society's pressure to hold them back. I am inspired!

As someone who will start law school in the fall, I was interested in Judith Richard Hope's Pinstripes and Pearls as much for the perspective on the law school experience as for the historical perspective on being in one of the first Harvard Law School classes with women. The book is at its best when it describes the appalling way the women were sometimes treated, both in law school, and as they entered the work force, and how they banded together to survive in the legal profession. It's a little weaker when it strays from that central storyline, however it's still a good read.

Hope documents her experience, and that of her 19 female classmates, as they entered Harvard Law School in the fall of 1961, in a class of 513 students. The book begins by providing an outline of the history of women at Harvard Law School. I was surprised to learn that Harvard was one of the last law schools to admit women, not opening their doors to them until 1950 (the reasons for the decision included the fact that turning a men's bathroom into a women's one would be extremely expensive). Hope provides some brief information about the childhoods and families of most of her female colleagues, before starting the story in earnest with registration day, where most of them meet.

From there, the story reads somewhat like an extreme version of Scott Turow's 1L, documenting the first year law school experience, along with all the added comments, criticism, and harassment the women must endure from plenty of male professors and fellow students. Amongst the many incidents described are a dinner party for the women held by a Dean; after dinner he asked all of them "Why are you at Harvard Law School, taking the place of a man?", and a class with a professor who would only call on female students on designated "Ladies' Days", humiliating them for the entertainment of the men.

The heroines of the novel are clearly all brilliant, determined women who survived by sticking together, and getting advice and support from each other and older female law students. Together they formed the "old-girls network" of the title, their answer to the "old boys network" that dominated the legal profession at the time (and to some extent still does). 15 of the 20 graduate with the class in 1964, and all but one ultimately graduate from a law school. Although it was very difficult at that time for women to find work in the legal profession ("How well can you type?" and "Will you tell your husband about this position?" are some of the questions the women get asked on interviews) the women help each other out once again, and most ultimately end up finding work as lawyers, with several rising to high powered political positions or becoming judges.

The book falters a bit when it tries to explore the age-old question of whether or not a women can really "do it all", having both a successful career and a family. It's a complex question that has no easy answer, and although Hope seems to be holding up many of her heroines as women who do indeed have it all, the stories she tells suggest otherwise. Many of the women have failed marriages or struggle with depression, and even those who are seemingly happy on the outside do not have the idyllic family life they may appear to. The author herself includes comments from her children that suggest that while she succeeded wonderfully as a female lawyer in a man's world, she failed as a mother. I felt that the stories of the women's personal disappointments, while an important part of their individual lives, detracted from the book about a group of trailblazing women who changed the face of the legal profession.

Also, while I am not attempting to condemn Hope for her desire to climb the private practice ranks, which often entails representing despicable clients, I was somewhat disappointed that the book included almost no mention of the moral issues involved, or her reasons for choosing to work in a firm that represented the Mob when her self-proclaimed reason for going to law school was to "to fight for what was fair and right".

Overall, however, Hope is an excellent writer, the prose is lively and engaging, and the stories she tells so interesting, that I found the book hard to put down; I read it all in one afternoon. The tone is a bit self-aggrandizing at times, but it's clear that Hope and her female classmates have earned the right to brag; not only did they graduate from one of the toughest law schools in the country, they bravely broke down barriers, and as the title suggests "paved the way for future generations".

When I first heard of the story, I thought "oh no, not another book about women lawyers" ~ but then I read it and became intranced with the lives of these HLS Women of '64. Think about the time, and you realize what great accomplishments these women made. This book will benefit the younger generation of women, or any woman for that matter who needs a boost to know that she can do anything she wants to do, but having the confidence to put one foot in front of the other regardless of background. The storyline is about 15 women, so keeping that in mind will make the book a much easier read. I highly recommend Pinstripes & Pearls for just the shear pleasure of learning a bit more of the inside details of these women's lives. The author did a great job at the difficult task of digging out details about Harvard's history as well. Thank you!

As someone who can relate to Ms. Rogers Hope's experiences because I went to Harvard Law a few years after she did and went through some but not all of the same experiences, I have to say that I ran out and bought this book and read it immediately. I then decided that this genre of Harvard history book has been beaten to death. Those of us who actually went to these "select" schools know the big secret that those who went elsewhere do not: They are just like every other school with, perhaps, a more intellectually dynamic student body.

Unfortunately, Ms. Rogers Hope chose to concentrate on a few of the women with whom she went to law school. Perhaps they were the ones who cooperated with her in writing this book. Perhaps they were the ones with the most interesting lives. Fundamentally, the women were no different than the women in my class many of whom did not have stellar careers or exciting lives. They just worked as lawyers and that was achievement enough.

And, I just got a survey from someone in the class of '72 who wants to interview me for a book about the classes of 1970-1971. Here we go again.